The web has dozens of paid search advertising networks – each with their strengths and weaknesses. Some are specially designed for particular niches and others for specific types of customers. Your advertising online will be structured around your goals.

The most important concept is that you must define your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for each of the steps down your purchase funnel. This includes cost per visitor, cost per lead, and cost per customer acquired. There are also cost per year for retained customer and other more sophisticated metrics, but most businesses need to establish and optimize for the basics.

Our goal will be to drive down the costs for achieving KPIs. We must use care that we don’t just transfer the costs elsewhere in your organization (e.g. lower quality leads are cheaper, but cost more time and energy by your sales team.)

Paid search complements organic results. This means that you cannot depend on paid search as your only traffic source – but it can supplement things in weak areas or in long-tail situations. It can also have some powerful advantages in e-commerce and lead generation.

The Landing Page and Post-Click Optimization

Getting traffic to your site is just part of the program. If everyone leaves immediately, you may think your paid search campaign is performing well (based on click-through-rate) but in fact it’s performing poorly. Worse, it’s wasting your marketing budget. We must be sure that the traffic arrives and acts in a way that justifies the cost per visitor. Not all keywords that generate traffic are desirable targets for paid search.

This process is called post-click optimization and is the “second half” of any paid search program. Strangely, many other companies omit this entirely, choosing to pitch their offer only on “pre-click optimization.” Be wary of incomplete programs like this.